A Thousand Words for Stranger

by Julie E. Czerneda

Series:

Trade Pact #1

Publisher:

DAW

Copyright:

October 1997

ISBN:

0-88677-769-0

Format:

Mass market

Pages:

366

Okay, I'll admit it. I bought this book for the cover. Well, I picked it
up because of
Susan Stepney's review, then put it down again, then came back and
bought it because of the cover. Waifish woman crouching in a loose robe,
wind blowing her hair across her face, in a beautifully detailed
background with her wrists bound.... Mm.

Remarkably, against the norm with SF, completely against the norm for
first novels, and entirely unexpectedly, the book very much fits the
cover. In fact, the cover is a detailed and almost-faithful
representation of a scene in the book. That's practically unheard of. I
wish publishers would let that happen more often.

Waif is an excellent description of the heroine of this book, who starts
off amnesiac, lost, and alone, with a strange compulsion to seek out a
particular starship pilot and get off the planet she's on. While there
are interludes told in the third person to fill in background details,
most of the book is told in the first person from her perspective, as she
slowly rediscovers her psychic abilities, learns that she is not actually
human, and figures out what happened to her and why. Oh, and falls in
love.

This is SF with romance tinges, more on the fluffy side, but there's still
far more than the average number of plot twists here. The tangle of
background story and character motivations end up being quite a bit more
complex than is apparent at the beginning, and I really like how the
amnesia is handled, including the resolution. I'm rather fond of the
world, too, although Cheryl Morgan nailed it in
Emerald City #96 in a review
of one of the later books in this series: this universe is elves in space.
The Clan are the elves, and the other aliens fit into the roles of the
boggles, goblins, and pixies. (I did like the avian alien who pants when
he's nervous, though.)

There were a few things that bugged me. For one, and this is probably in
part because this is a first novel, the melodrama occasionally gets laid
on rather thick. I kept half-expecting Barac to sneer in disgust and cry
out "Puny Humans, your technology is no match for my MENTAL POWERS!" I
had a bit of a hard time buying the culture of the Clan, too, and even
worse the gender roles here can be painful. The attempted inversion of
some gender power roles didn't really work and instead came off as a play
on the woman as seducer stereotype, and why, oh why, does there have to be
such an emphasis on curvy bodies and long, flowing hair? And it may just
be me, but I think someone secretly gave Rael a personality transplant
halfway through the book.

Still, this was an enjoyable read. I loved the attitude of the heroine, I
greatly enjoyed how she fit into the waif mold while still proving quite
competent in a pinch, I liked the M'hir concept of telepathy and mental
powers (points off for the "we put in an apostrophe so that you know it's
a non-human word" method of naming, though), and the plot kept twisting in
directions I wasn't expecting. Recommended for lighter reading, and I'll
read the rest of the series.